From The Ramparts

Duped Again

Duped by Psychological Warfare Again

Secaucus - Last Thursday on Countdown, I referred to the latest terror threat - the reported bomb plot against the New York City subway system - in terms of its timing. President Bush’s speech about the war on terror had come earlier the same day, as had the breaking news of the possible indictment of Karl Rove in the CIA leak investigation. I suggested that in the last three years there had been about 13 similar coincidences - a political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning. We figured we’d better put that list of coincidences on the public record. We did so this evening on the television program, with ten of these examples. The other three are listed at the end of the main list, out of chronological order. The contraction was made purely for the sake of television timing considerations, and permitted us to get the live reaction of the former Undersecretary of Homeland Security, Asa Hutchinson.- Keith Obermann Countdown MSNBC

I peruse the extremely informative Website www.Whatreallyahppened.com several times a day for links to numerous topics but mostly government corruption and the illegal and imperialist motives and underpinnings of Bu$h and Co’s War on Terrorism. I am able to glean ideas and material for commentaries from this and other Websites and online versions of newspapers and periodicals. On Friday October 15 WRH contained two especially interesting links: one to www.MSNBC.com and the other to a research study conducted by Robb Willer of Cornell University entitled The Effects of Government-Issued Terror Warnings on Presidential Approval Ratings . The common thread uniting both of them was the documentation of a very real correlation between US government terror alert created distractions and presidential approval ratings. The MSNBC site contained video clips of Keith Obermann’s program Countdown in which he lists thirteen occasions over the past three years when the Bu$h administration was facing bad news or was in a tough and within days a terrorist alert would be issued. Keep in mind Obermann documents thirteen such occasions and added interviews and video clips to buttress his report. Willis on the other hand uses sociological and psychological methods and analysis to support his theory government issued terror warnings could increase support for the president. In his twelve page report which was published in December of 2004 Willis concludes, “The present research sought to evaluate whether the threat of terrorism increases support for standing leaders. To test this idea I investigated Gallup poll data on presidential approval to see if it increased following government issued terror warnings. I found consistent evidence supporting the hypothesis that government issued terror warnings led to increases in President Bush’s approval levels. Further I found evidence that the threat of terror may lead to more positive evaluations of th e president on a dimension largely irrelevant to terrorism, his handling of the economy. I was unable to establish how long these effects typically last. I leave that question and further exploration of the empirical regularities observed to future research.” p 10 In his conclusion Obermann states, “To summarize, coincidences are coincidences. We could probably construct a similar time line of terror events and warnings, and their relationship to - the opening of new Walmarts around the country. Are these coincidences signs that the government’s approach has worked because none of the announced threats ever materialized? Are they signs that the government has not yet mastered how and when to inform the public? Is there, in addition to the ‘fog of war’ a simple, benign, ‘fog of intelligence’ But, if merely a reasonable case can be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country - questions about what is prudence, and what is fear-mongering; questions about which is the threat of death by terror, and which is the terror of threat?”
Is it a mere coincidence or is it a deliberate and designed policy used to keep the AmeriKKKan sheeple afraid, anxious and in a state of pliability and manipulation to justify massive expenditures for “defense”, “homeland security” and a diminution of civil and procedural liberties? If you couple this terror warning pattern with the deceit and disinformation the NeoConmen used to sell the bogus and now totally discredited claims of WMD in Iraq does this add up to an even more sinister agenda? Is all this part of the psychological warfare being waged against the AmeriKKkan public by the ruling elites using the corporate media to usher in corporatist fascism and their New World Order? What’s your opinion, what do you think?

-30-

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 7:00 AM